Monday, January 21, 2013

It's hard to believe, but the era of the digital camera, at least in terms of widespread use by the general public, is barely a decade old. And goodness knows, we've been happy snappers for a lot longer than that! One of the somewhat annoying consequences of a history of traveling and photography is a closet stuffed with boxes of 35mm slides that nobody looks at any more. Seriously, we can't even remember the last time we pulled out the projector and screen and sat down to a good old slide show.

We've talked about digitizing our collection for years, but finally late last fall we spotted a Groupon offer that moved all that talk into the realm of the probable. It was for a digital scanner, and it was at a price that we felt justified the investment in both time and equipment. So we went for it.

Today we pulled out the first box and did a little experimenting. It's tedious work, no question- each slide has to be individually popped into the scanner. And going forward, each will need a little advance TLC: they'll need a few blasts with air and perhaps a gentle caress from a sensor brush, but for now the results look promising. We're not about to win any photo contests, but we weren't expecting perfection. We simply wanted a way to move all those locked-away images back into the world of living data, and most importantly, to be able to blow the dust off some of those great memories. Here are a couple from Belgium in 2002: